SimCity’s Nissan DLC: the right idea at the wrong time

I actually think that in-game ads are great. Just not this one.

The first post-release DLC for SimCity has been released, and it's, well... it's an ad. You can plop down Nissan LEAF (objectionable capitals Nissan's own) charging stations for a boost in happiness. The DLC is free, as are the buildings in the game. They act more or less like parks.

It's common to rail against advertising in games. I, however, think that this DLC is perfectly fine. Desirable, in fact. But its timing? It couldn't be worse.

SimCity is a city simulator. I would love if my cities could have real businesses. If McDonald's, say, wants to pay EA some money so that my commercial zones can occasionally sprout some golden arches, so much the better. We can already build certain real-world landmark buildings. Adding real-world companies is a step in the same direction.

Enlarge/ Sure, it's got Nissan logos plastered all over it, but so do Nissan card dealerships in the real world.

Moreover, this is precisely the form that in-game advertising should take. It's realistic. If we were seeing Leaf billboards in a first person shooter set in 2070, or, worse, 1870, then yes, that'd be an unwanted intrusion. But it isn't. It's designed in a way that's consistent with the rest of the SimCity artwork. It fits in.

The problem I have is simply the timing. EA has delivered a game that is broken in a variety of important ways. The company's sole priority at this point in time should be making the simulation work. It requires major rewriting to do that (either an abandonment of the agent model, or a substantially overhauled model, to include persistent agents with assigned homes and workplaces, sensible pathfinding, and proper education), and it requires a much richer set of transport options. It also has some glorious bugs: set the tax rate to zero percent, and your sims cease to care about having water, electricity, jobs to go to, or anything else. Result? 1.8 million happy citizens. As it is, the simulation aspect is not even beta quality.

It's for that reason that this DLC rubs me up the wrong way; EA is making yet more money from a flawed game before introducing steps to fix it.

True, the people who developed this DLC are unlikely to overlap meaningfully with the people whose job it is to fix the game (presuming that there even are such people). I don't think that's really the point, though. When your game is fundamentally flawed, this kind of overt profit-taking serves only to salt the wound. It betrays that money, rather than artistry or taking pride in their work, is primarily what EA cares about.

116 Reader Comments

Best case in the entire United States (far south west, anywhere else is going to be worse off) is an average of around 9 kWh/m^2/day. The majority of the country is half that or less, as is Europe and much of Asia. A single Nissan Leaf has a 24 kWh battery pack. Do the math.

For a typical parking space (~17m^2 - I'm excluding the panels' overhang), 9 kWh/m^2/day would charge a Leaf in four hours. That's about how long it takes to charge a Leaf using the usual 220V charger that you get installed in your garage. Am I doing the math wrong?

Keep in mind, most electric car owners aren't charging from zero at public chargers, nor charging to 100%.

Your argument is wrong on multiple levels, probably in part due to your analysis (though it barely deserves that adjective) being incredibly shallow. That you wrote such a thing without even exercising even a single brain cell in thinking about perverse incentives or thinking about the DLC in question would be laughable if it wasn't so disappointing.

I can only assume your post is intended as some kind of parody.

The idea that unlicensed use of trademarks by modders is in some way a reasonable substitute is absurd. Should any such mod become popular, it would also be, quite reasonably, sued.

I just think that an electric car charging station that uses NO electricity is asinine.

It does have photovoltaics drawn on top.

DrPizza wrote:

indolent wrote:

I just think that an electric car charging station that uses NO electricity is asinine.

It has solar cells on its roof.

Best case in the entire United States (far south west, anywhere else is going to be worse off) is an average of around 9 kWh/m^2/day. The majority of the country is half that or less, as is Europe and much of Asia. A single Nissan Leaf has a 24 kWh battery pack. Do the math.

Actually, you'd probably be surprised to find that averaged over a year, the very worst place in the US for incident solar power is half as bad as the very best. Suggesting that the average location is half that much with many much worse is flat wrong. The very worst place is half that much with all other places being much more than half as good. That being said you wouldn't be able charge too many leafs off the apparent solar panels in that picture either way.

I would have liked to have assumed your post was parody but that would be a bit too much of a stretch. Can't really expect much from someone who finds DLC cheat codes desirable though I suppose.

Swarley wrote:

Actually, you'd probably be surprised to find that averaged over a year, the very worst place in the US for incident solar power is half as bad as the very best. Suggesting that the average location is half that much with many much worse is flat wrong.

Cool story bro. Meanwhile we have the DoE National Renewable Energy Laboratory solar radiation maps page. Available both per month and as an annual average, annual linked below.Spoilered for being a large image:

Spoiler: show

Edit: For what it's worth, I didn't actually track the exact average I just eyeballed it. I'd be curious to see where you're getting that the national annual average is >4.5-5.0. At any rate, I did go to the best source I knew and checked first. If the DoE is wrong I'd be happy to know that.

EA probably had a contractual obligation to release this DLC on a certain date. And I'm sure they were paid before the game ever hit store shelves.

You're probably exactly right and I hadn't considered this....

That being said, I was drunk on the Things-are-ok-and-it-will-get-better-dont-worry-guys-Kool-Aid up until I read this article, because user Workaround is bang on:

Workaround wrote:

Until people stop buying the games, they have no incentive to NOT do shit like this.

Maybe we DO need to make a stronger effort in voting with our wallets, but it's awfully hard to judge a game before you've played it, and when it's franchise has a track record of delivering gold, how can you not get caught up in the hype?

I pre-ordered months ahead of release, so a charge-back through my credit card wasn't an option, though I understand others were able to circumvent the no-digitial-download-refund policy with this tactic. I was clinging to the hope that now, a month after release, the game's functionality would be restored. To my knowledge, this has not happened and Cheetah mode is still regular (Llama?) mode, meanwhile @SimCity on twitter continuous to reply with ambiguous indication of when things might be resolvedI'm starting to believe they're just not going to be, because the engine itself isn't built for it. GlassBox is supposed to be some cool new thing potentially usable for other sims and yet, have we heard so much as a peep about persistent agents?

But hey -- EA's been doing a good job, right? The @SimCity twitter account stopped negatively calling users out mere days after launch, and this DLC doesn't cost us anything. (foreshadowing) If anything, what an ungrateful bunch of user's we've been, expecting so much from this company, with only $5.491 billion dollars worth of assets.

Ads in games are objectionable enough that it will factor into many peoples' purchase decision. Therefore, it makes since that EA would introduce them into the game AFTER people have already made that decision

I would have liked to have assumed your post was parody but that would be a bit too much of a stretch. Can't really expect much from someone who finds DLC cheat codes desirable though I suppose.

Swarley wrote:

Actually, you'd probably be surprised to find that averaged over a year, the very worst place in the US for incident solar power is half as bad as the very best. Suggesting that the average location is half that much with many much worse is flat wrong.

Cool story bro. Meanwhile we have the DoE National Renewable Energy Laboratory solar radiation maps page. Available both per month and as an annual average, annual linked below.Spoilered for being a large image:

Spoiler: show

Edit: For what it's worth, I didn't actually track the exact average I just eyeballed it. I'd be curious to see where you're getting that the national annual average is >4.5-5.0. At any rate, I did go to the best source I knew and checked first. If the DoE is wrong I'd be happy to know that.

My info from the same place you did. Although I left out "lower 48 states" in my original statement which made it technically false. But if you look at the map you linked to for flat panel solar potential you'll see that nowhere in the continental US does worse than about half what you get in the mojave desert. You can confirm this with the raw data (http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/pubs/redbook/). And yes, the annual average is about 4.8 kWh/m²/day. There is a tremendous amount of excellent analysis about this stuff on a UCSD physics professor's blog about energy use ironically called "do the math". http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/

I just think that an electric car charging station that uses NO electricity is asinine.

It has solar cells on its roof.

Those are some pretty dang efficient cells.

Everything is condensed in SimCity. The population density can reach about 400,000 per square kilometre, which I think far surpasses any city on earth. Stands to reason that they're getting much more solar electricity per square metre than normal!

That's still enough to charge the car in 8 hours, or give you ten miles of range in an hour, which I guess would help in a pinch.

Realistically, it wouldn't work that way. The station would have 220V and/or 480V chargers, which would juice up a Leaf from 0 to 80% in 3-4 hours and 30 minutes, respectively (using the 480V chargers all the time degrades your battery capacity more quickly). The chargers would draw power from the grid, but the photovoltaics would feed power back to the grid. Given how few electric cars there are right now, the station would be a net producer.

OK, I'll go with that then. The Leaf physical spec sheet from Nissan gives it a length of 4.445 meters and width of 1.77 meters. Opening up the picture in the article in Photoshop and using the ruler tool the compare the ratios of the parked Leafs to the solar panels it looks like a ratio of something like 2.42:1. Treating them generously as rectangles along their longest axis rather then rounded corners, that'd make for a total solar collection area there of about 230 m²? What's a good generous number to use for the solar cells? I think Semprius has HCPV panels at 34% or so, so assuming those were used that'd mean total electrical generation of around 376 kWh/day, enough to fully charge around 15 Leafs/day. Did I miss anything there? Presumably since a connection the grid is unneeded the station has local battery storage to rapidly charge cars, and then after it's gone through the first 15 the station, like EA corporation as a whole, is fueled by the souls of the damned.

We should all be contacting Nissan USA and let them know how disappointed we are that they advertised in such a poor game. Make Nissan hate Sim City. Actions like these are really the only sort of message that will get to EA.

I'm somewhat surprised that Nissan want to be associated with this train wreck in the first place. The media coverage of this DLC has been overwhelmingly negative, which should make other potential 'advertisers' think twice.

...set the tax rate to zero percent, and your sims cease to care about having water, electricity, jobs to go to, or anything else.

The only Sim City game I ever played was the original on my Amiga 500. Back then, I often set the tax rate to 0% Jan-Nov. Then I'd jack it to the max in December and receive the maximum cash while barely impacting my citizens' happiness. I wonder if that still works.

I have commented on the other article but I will comment here as well. In my opinion, I am not entirely against the idea of having advertisement in video games. Perhaps we have been spoiled in history where we have been able to get away with all these games and not have advertisement or other forms of intrusion into our video games.

As mentioned previously, I find the biggest concern is whether or not our immersion to the game will be broken due to the advertisement. If it is done in a proper and well thought out manner, we should not be distracted or taken away from our immersion. The unfortunate side of this story is that the way EA went about designing the station makes it seem very lazy and concerned more on the advertisement aspect and not what benefits the customers.

Regardless, this is just another blemish on an already disappointing company as of right now.

The cars only have to drive a couple of km, so it's not like they need a full charge!

Sigh. Correct and made me feel sad.

That said, look at the Tesla Supercharger stations, Those have overhead PV panels, and Tesla's estimates are that the solar panels on top will generate as much as the superchargers use in kWhs. Now its not 1:1 all the time, but on a net-metering basis, they use effectively zero electricity.

The game has 2 million sales despite its well-advertised flaws, and EA has a proven track record of being crappy.

What possible incentive do they have to make a good game and support it? They have a bad reputation. They released a game that was buggy as hell and super flawed even if it wasn't buggy. It still is selling like crazy.

Until people stop buying the games, they have no incentive to NOT do shit like this.

I've known heroin addicts who take a day of withdrawal better than gamers whose Internet goes out for a few minutes. At this point I take someone's claim of "EA is terrible! How could they do this?" about as seriously as the "Oh my god I don't know how that got here that's disgusting!" from someone who asked me to clean up their computer but didn't bother to hide the huge amount of disturbing pornography that was the root cause of their problem. It's really the same thing: they like whatever they're into so much that they're willing to deal with the negatives in private, but in public they must feign outrage because of course, we're civilized people, how could we possibly support such a thing, why are these people so depraved....

In other words: Hell will fall below absolute zero before gamers stop throwing money into odious DRM technology, no matter how many claim otherwise.

I agree that it's cool to have real-life businesses set up shop in your city, but only if it's done in a realistic way. The magical 100% solar powered car charging stations that make everyone nearby happy just to be in their presence is pure marketing drivel.

What's next, not requiring hospitals in your city anymore thanks to the life-giving properties of Chicken McNuggets?

The problem with paid DLC is not the branding, several games have shown that adding true brands can enhance the experience (Gran Turismo or Crazy Taxi come to mind).

The problem is that if a company is paying to be part of the game, they want their brand to be seen in a positive way. In racing sims that use real brands, they are usually not allowed to have realistic damages. In SimCity, that Nissan station is pure bonus, and has no negative. It would be the same for any brand. To choose an obvious exemple : Let's say a coal company wants to advertise in SimCity, do you think they would accept that the branded plant generates a ton of pollution ?

Almost any major activity has some downsides, which is part of the fun of city builders (choosing your buildings and locations to minimise negative effects) : Fast food isn't good for your health, Airplane travel is noisy and generates pollutions, etc. Companies paying to be added in the game do that precisely to show the good side, not the bad side of their activity. Hence, that would break the balance/reduce the fun of the game.

I assume the garbage free, water, electricity, worker free building is so that it always appears clean and never falls into disrepair or gets abandoned.

I don't think this kind of building would work on a larger scale if it functions like this one. Requiring no resources whatsoever, and producing no waste products, a large amount of this kind of building would break the simulation, creating a city that would have barely any waste, almost no water and electricity use, but negatively affects employment, because these buildings don't use employers.

I'm starting to think that EA has more sway over what the game developers do next than I had imagined. Having spent the last year watching EA and DICE release DLC after DLC for Battlefield 3 (each adding only small additions in content only) and for the most part neglecting to fix game-breaking balance bugs, this is starting to seem uncomfortably familiar.

Given EAs trackrecord and reviews of Simcity the game still sold (selling?) pretty well. Didn't that just prove that EA is making the right choices not caring about customers after they bought the game and just bet everything on marketing?

Releasing a flawed product only opened the possibilities to future releases that fixes the problems and I bet they are still going to rake in cash with them.

1/ LEAF is a backronym for, depending on the source and date, "Light, Energy efficient, Affordable, Family car" or "Leading, Environmentally friendly, Affordable, Family car", so it is proper to capitalize it, however awkward it is.

2/ It's funny that with SimCity they associated with Nissan, for the Sims 3 they had a partnership with Toyota (with two Prius DLC) and Renault (with a Twizy and a Fluence, Renault however is in a strategic partnership with Nissan).

3/ Cities XL gave you ads with no functional use and without asking you, here at least you have a choice.

Best case in the entire United States (far south west, anywhere else is going to be worse off) is an average of around 9 kWh/m^2/day. The majority of the country is half that or less, as is Europe and much of Asia. A single Nissan Leaf has a 24 kWh battery pack. Do the math.

For a typical parking space (~17m^2 - I'm excluding the panels' overhang), 9 kWh/m^2/day would charge a Leaf in four hours. That's about how long it takes to charge a Leaf using the usual 220V charger that you get installed in your garage. Am I doing the math wrong?

Keep in mind, most electric car owners aren't charging from zero at public chargers, nor charging to 100%.

That's 9kwh per day, not per 4 hours. So in effect you have to charge it for 8 hours assuming 8 hours effective sunlight and that American sunlight intensity is representable to most parts of earth.

This is an imbalanced overpowered building that was deliberately made that way by Nissan marketing dollars, so you'd want to put it in every city for free magic happiness. If that's your idea of acceptable in a simulation game, then you and I are very, VERY far apart in what's acceptable. I assume you'd also be okay with a Burger King that increased citizen health?

The fact that the game is a buggy mess and they released this anyway is just added insult.

Given EAs trackrecord and reviews of Simcity the game still sold (selling?) pretty well. Didn't that just prove that EA is making the right choices not caring about customers after they bought the game and just bet everything on marketing?

Releasing a flawed product only opened the possibilities to future releases that fixes the problems and I bet they are still going to rake in cash with them.

Not sure myself how much of my comment was sarcasm...

They probably are making the right choice in terms of short term sales dollars, given how well the marketing department managed to bamboozle the early "professional" reviewers to give it absurdly high scores. It was really something watching the scores trend downwards after the game came out and actual users started pointing out all the problems with it. (At the end of the day, this whole fiasco was a black eye on game reviewers.)

But in doing that, EA has done long term damage to the brand. If they ever try to release another one, they're going to face a much more skeptical market.

What they should have done is spent six more months making things work, along with removing the online only BS.

Until people stop buying the games, they have no incentive to NOT do shit like this.

Maybe we DO need to make a stronger effort in voting with our wallets, but it's awfully hard to judge a game before you've played it, and when it's franchise has a track record of delivering gold, how can you not get caught up in the hype?

I pre-ordered months ahead of release, so a charge-back through my credit card wasn't an option, though I understand others were able to circumvent the no-digitial-download-refund policy with this tactic.

There's your problem. Don't pre-order. Problem solved.

Any game worth buying before it's available will still be worth buying two weeks after it's available. All you're doing by pre-ordering is throwing money away and hoping you get something good at the end of it. It's like investing in Kickstarter, only you're giving the money to EA.

That's what I did, and I saved $60 and a lot of grief out of it in this case.

Won't be playing this game anymore until its agent system is fixed. If it won't be, Simcity is dead to me eternally. Their GDC comments about how complexity is detrimental to the game just sound like more bunk to me.

One thing I learned about EA a long time ago. Never buy zero day. Wait a few weeks after the reviews and all have come out. I was excited about Sim City, I had been hankering for a city builder for a while and, frankly, Tropico 4 is fun but it's not quite the same. I hovered my hand over the 'pre-order' button on steam quite a few times, but kept seeing that EA logo and knowing that I'd regret it if I did. So I held off.

I have Sim City 5 on my Steam Wishlist, for 1 reason only, to get the notification when it goes on sale. If the bugs and kvetching still exist when that happens, off the wish list it goes, and I'll wait for the next great city simulator.

Then again, by the time they fix this, there will be 5 required DLCs @ 14.99 a pop as well.

I just think that an electric car charging station that uses NO electricity is asinine.

It does have photovoltaics drawn on top.

DrPizza wrote:

indolent wrote:

I just think that an electric car charging station that uses NO electricity is asinine.

It has solar cells on its roof.

Best case in the entire United States (far south west, anywhere else is going to be worse off) is an average of around 9 kWh/m^2/day. The majority of the country is half that or less, as is Europe and much of Asia. A single Nissan Leaf has a 24 kWh battery pack. Do the math.

I don't own SimCity (really hesitant to buy because of the many issues outlined), so please excuse me if I am wrong, but compare this electric charging station to regular gas pumps in your virtual world, how much petrol do you need to supply to your regular gas station to keep it running?